An Inconvenient Truth: Political Correctness

Every time I hear my grandmother spout out some dated, politically "incorrect" phrase to describe a group of people or even an individual we encounter, I cringe a little bit on the inside. But when I think about it here, there's nothing that bothers me more than people freaking out about being so "correct" in their speech that they censor their thoughts to comply with the mass opinion of cultural sensitivity. Now I would NEVER dream of using the n-word or something so pejorative to describe someone, but on a simpler level, I don't see a difference in calling a person "black" or "African-American", for example. In fact, most of the time, "black" more accurately defines the person's race, and I've heard that many black people don't even feel a tie to their African roots, and don't feel the desire to be addressed as such.

Now this is just one example of what bothers me, but there are many more cases, especially when you get into descriptions of people with a physical or mental handicap (and even now, I'm censoring to be politically correct). The basis of my annoyance at peoples' obsession with not offending everyone is that it causes a loss of communicative abilities when you tiptoe around what you want to say in order to spare someone's feelings. Do you think famous revolutionary authors censored their writing to comply with societies' rules? I certainly don't; I think they said things as they were in the simplest terms possible. And if that happened to offend people, well, they could just get over themselves and learn to be less sensitive.

I mean seriously, when I overhear someone blatantly throwing in the newest politically correct term with a sarcastic overtone, it causes me to lose respect for what they're trying to say. It also can actually make what they're saying seem more offensive, just because they're going out of their way to remain sensitive to someone that they, in truth, hold themselves apart from.

I know that offending people is never a good idea in this interconnected world, but I also think people need to toughen up a little bit and know that just because someone doesn't use a term that has been deemed the most sensitive doesn't mean they're mocking or attempting to invoke animosity with their statement. And perhaps it will take a slip up on my part, a mistake that offends someone seriously and jeopardizes something I care about for me to start subscribing to this politically correct fad, but until then, I think I'll choose not to censor my thoughts to spare someone's feelings.